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takyon writes:

http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2017/08/042.html

Human antidepressants are building up in the brains of bass, walleye and several other fish common to the Great Lakes region, scientists say. In a new study, researchers detected high concentrations of these drugs and their metabolized remnants in the brain tissue of 10 fish species found in the Niagara River. [...] "These active ingredients from antidepressants, which are coming out from wastewater treatment plants, are accumulating in fish brains," Aga says. "It is a threat to biodiversity, and we should be very concerned.

[...] "The levels of antidepressants found do not pose a danger to humans who eat the fish, especially in the U.S., where most people do not eat organs like the brain," Singh says. "However, the risk that the drugs pose to biodiversity is real, and scientists are just beginning to understand what the consequences might be."

[...] The highest concentration of a single compound was found in a rock bass, which had about 400 nanograms of norsertraline — a metabolite of sertraline, the active ingredient in Zoloft — per gram of brain tissue. This was in addition to a cocktail of other compounds found in the same fish, including citalopram, the active ingredient in Celexa, and norfluoxetine, a metabolite of the active ingredient in Prozac and Sarafem. More than half of the fish brain samples had norsertraline levels of 100 nanograms per gram or higher. In addition, like the rock bass, many of the fish had a medley of antidepressant drugs and metabolites in their brains.

Evidence that antidepressants can change fish behavior generally comes from laboratory studies that expose the animals to higher concentrations of drugs than what is found in the Niagara River. But the findings of the new study are still worrisome: The antidepressants that Aga's team detected in fish brains had accumulated over time, often reaching concentrations that were several times higher than the levels in the river.

Also at Detroit Free Press.

Selective Uptake and Bioaccumulation of Antidepressants in Fish from Effluent-Impacted Niagara River (DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.7b02912) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/neanderthals-were-distilling-tar-200-thousand-years-ago-in-europe/

Despite many recent discoveries that show Neanderthals were technologically and socially sophisticated, there's still a popular idea that these heavy-browed, pale-skinned early humans were mentally inferior to modern Homo sapiens. Now we have even more corroboration that they were pretty sharp. A fascinating new study reveals that Neanderthals were distilling tar for tool-making 200 thousand years ago—long before evidence of tar-making among Homo sapiens. And an experimental anthropologist has some good hypotheses for how they did it, too.

One of humanity's earliest technological breakthroughs was learning to distill tar from tree bark. It was key to making compound tools with two or more parts; adhesives could keep a stone blade nicely fitted into a wooden handle for use as a hoe, an axe, or even a spear. Scientists have discovered ancient beads of tar in Italy, Germany, and several other European sites dating back as much as 200 thousand years, which is about 150 thousand years before modern Homo sapiens arrived in Western Europe. That means the people who distilled that tar had to be Neanderthals.

[...] [Paul] Kozowyk and his fellow researchers [...] set about trying to make tar using only the tools Neanderthals had available. These included fire, ash, birch bark, sharp stones, and mesh woven from sticks. Kozowyk and his team tested three ways to make tar from birch bark, and they measured tar output, temperature, and complexity of the task.

[...] Neanderthals might have figured out how to make tar by accident when a stray piece of birch bark began to ooze tar near the fire. Then it would have been a relatively simple matter for the ancient people to figure out that tar was sticky and ultimately to deduce that it could be used to secure their tools better.

Experimental methods for the Palaeolithic dry distillation of birch bark: implications for the origin and development of Neandertal adhesive technology (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-08106-7) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/03/548299633/san-diego-declares-health-emergency-amid-hepatitis-a-outbreak

San Diego's homeless population has been hit hardest by the highly contagious hepatitis A virus.

The outbreak, which began in November, has spread after vaccination and educational programs in the city failed to reduce the infection rate. The virus attacks the liver.

The public health declaration bolsters the county Health and Human Services Agency's ability to request state assistance to fund new sanitation measures. Areas with high concentrations of homeless people will receive dozens of portable hand-washing stations. Health workers will also use bleached-spiked water for power-washing contaminated surfaces.

Dr. Wilma Wooten, the San Diego Public Health Officer who signed the declaration into law on Friday, says the sanitation precautions are modeled after similar programs in other Southern California cities - including Los Angeles.

Also at Voice of San Diego, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and LA Times.

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

Hackaday has an article about a 3D advertising sign in Times Square.

Coca-Cola has updated their sign in Times Square, and this one has a mesmerizing 3D aspect to it, giving the spooky feeling you get from watching buildings curl up into the sky in the movie, Inception. That 3D is created by breaking the sign up into a 68’x42′ matrix of 1760 LED screens that can be independently extended out toward the viewer and retracted again. Of course, we went hunting for implementation details

The article looks at the available information on the display modules, and the control of the sign. It also has links to video of the sign in action from the designers, Radius displays

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SpaceX has successfully tested all three of its Falcon Heavy first stage cores ahead of a planned maiden launch in November:

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is hoping to launch his company's Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time in November, and with just a couple of months to go, the company announced that it has completed testing on all three of the rocket's first stage cores.

In the tweet, the company says that three first stage cores have completed their testing, and showed off a video of a static test of one of the cores. The company conducted its first static test of the Falcon Heavy's main core in May.

More about SpaceX's big year.

[For more about the Falcon Heavy, see SpaceX and Wikipedia. --Ed.]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

President Trump has nominated Representative Jim Bridenstine as NASA's next administrator, to replace the acting administrator Robert M. Lightfoot:

Representative Jim Bridenstine, Republican of Oklahoma, will be nominated by President Trump to serve as NASA's next administrator, the White House said on Friday night.

Mr. Bridenstine, a strong advocate for drawing private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin more deeply into NASA's exploration of space, had been rumored to be the leading candidate for the job, but months passed without an announcement. If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Bridenstine, 42, would be the first elected official to hold that job.

[...] Although NASA has little presence in Oklahoma, Mr. Bridenstine, a former Navy Reserve pilot who is now in his third term in the House [of] Representatives, has long had an interest in space. Before being elected to Congress in 2012, he was executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum and Planetarium from 2008 to 2010.

[...] Mr. Bridenstine has supported a return to the moon, a departure from the Obama administration's focus on sending astronauts to Mars in coming decades.

Florida's Senators Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson blasted the choice. Nelson said that "The head of NASA ought to be a space professional, not a politician."

NASA statement. NASA Watch analysis.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Footprints on Greek island are 5.7 million years old

Fossil footprints laid down more than five million years ago in what is now Crete could belong to a previously unknown primate, and perhaps even an ancient hominin — an animal more closely related to humans than to chimps.

Per Ahlberg at Uppsala University in Sweden and his colleagues identified more than 50 fossil traces in an area less than 4 metres square. The animal responsible for the prints — left some 5.7 million years ago — was probably claw-less, bipedal, walked on the soles of its feet, and had other hominin-like characteristics.

Also at Uppsala University:

Human feet have a very distinctive shape, different from all other land animals. The combination of a long sole, five short forward-pointing toes without claws, and a hallux ("big toe") that is larger than the other toes, is unique. The feet of our closest relatives, the great apes, look more like a human hand with a thumb-like hallux that sticks out to the side.

[...] The new footprints, from Trachilos in western Crete, have an unmistakably human-like form. This is especially true of the toes. The big toe is similar to our own in shape, size and position; it is also associated with a distinct 'ball' on the sole, which is never present in apes. The sole of the foot is proportionately shorter than in the Laetoli prints, but it has the same general form. In short, the shape of the Trachilos prints indicates unambiguously that they belong to an early hominin, somewhat more primitive than the Laetoli trackmaker. They were made on a sandy seashore, possibly a small river delta, whereas the Laetoli tracks were made in volcanic ash.

Possible hominin footprints from the late Miocene (c. 5.7 Ma) of Crete? (DOI: 10.1016/j.pgeola.2017.07.006) (DX)

Original Submission

We had three Soylentils submit stories about North Korea's claims it had detonated a hydrogen bomb and reports of seismic activity.

North Korea has Conducted a Major Nuclear Test.

realDonaldTrump writes:

North Korea said on Sunday it detonated a hydrogen bomb, possibly triggering an artificial earthquake and prompting immediate condemnation from its neighbors -- despite the rogue regime calling the test a "perfect success." http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/09/03/quake-in-north-korea-may-have-been-nuclear-test.html

North Korea Claims Successful Hydrogen Bomb Test

takyon writes:

North Korea claims to have successfully developed and tested a hydrogen bomb. Observers have detected tremors associated with a blast several times larger than previous underground nuclear bomb tests. North Korea also claimed to have developed a hydrogen bomb capable of being fitted on a missile:

North Korea carried out its most powerful nuclear test to date on Sunday, claiming to have developed an advanced hydrogen bomb that could sit atop an intercontinental ballistic missile.

The bomb used in the country's sixth-ever nuclear test sent tremors across the region that were 10 times more powerful than Pyongyang's previous test a year ago, Japanese officials said. While the type of bomb used and its size have not been independently verified, if true, the pariah state is a significant step closer to being able to fire a nuclear warhead to the US mainland, as it has repeatedly threatened it could if provoked.

[...] The device was more than eight times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, according to NORSAR, a Norway-based group that monitors nuclear tests. Based on the tremors that followed the test, NORSAR estimated it had an explosive yield of 120 kilotons. Hiroshima's had 15 kilotons. But South Korean officials gave a more modest estimation, saying that Sunday's bomb had a yield of 50 kilotons.

がんばれ! 你能行的!! 화이팅!!!

Also at BBC, Reuters, and NYT.

4.1 Magnitude Seismic Event in North Korea at a Low Depth

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Earthquake News Today initially reported that a 5.1 magnitude event designated 2000aert had occurred near Sungjibaegam, North Korea at a depth of less than 1km at 03:30 UTC September 3.

Their updated report 2.5 hours later gave a magnitude of 4.1.

All reporting stations were in the USA.

NPR, formerly Nation Public Radio, subsequently reports

North Korea has claimed to have tested a hydrogen bomb

The blast was picked up by seismic stations all over the world, and it was big.

[...]North Korea's previous nuclear tests have been in the tens of kilotons range. That corresponds roughly to a weapon the size of the ones used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. It's believed that the North's earlier tests were of nuclear weapons that use uranium or plutonium (or both) for their explosive yield.

This time, the North claims to have mastered a far more powerful hydrogen weapon. Some early estimates are putting this test in the hundreds of kiloton range.

[...]Modern nuclear weapons of the sort possessed by the U.S. and Russia are almost all thermonuclear in nature. It allows the weapons to pack a huge punch while fitting in a warhead small enough to be delivered by a missile.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2  Original Submission #3 

tonyPick writes:

Ars Technica is reporting on a story where the CDC report that a Homeopathic “healing bracelet” caused lead poisoning in a infant girl

[...] during a routine health screening. Healthcare workers found that the baby was anemic and had a blood lead level of 41 micrograms per deciliter (μg/dL). While no level of lead is known to be safe, the CDC recommends health interventions when a child’s blood lead level reaches 5 μg/dL.

[...] The authorities subsequently homed in on the bracelet, a homemade “homeopathic magnetic hematite healing bracelet.” The baby’s parents said they bought it from an artisan at a local fair and gave it to the baby to wear and mouth to ease teething pain. Small spacer beads on the bracelet (shown) tested positive for lead at a level of 17,000 parts-per-million. The Consumer Product Commission in 2010 set the allowable limit of lead in products intended for children at 100 parts-per-million.

The authors of the report—Drs. Patricia Garcia and Jennifer Haile, lead treatment specialists at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center—noted that the bracelet had no warnings or branding. They added that they couldn’t get the fair’s vendor information and were unable to track down the bracelet’s maker.

Also at Live Science

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Astronomers have used the Kepler Space Telescope to observe changes in the brightness of stars in the Pleiades star cluster. Normally, the high brightness of these stars would be too much for Kepler's camera, but a new technique can ignore saturated pixels and glean information about changes in brightness:

While the central pixels in an image of a star become too saturated to take accurate scientific measurements of its brightness, the unaffected pixels around that superbright spot still contain accurate information. This is useful for measuring changes in the brightness of these so-called variable stars, the study's authors report.

"The solution to observing bright stars with Kepler turned out to be rather simple," Tim White, an astrophysicist at Aarhus University in Denmark and lead author of the study, said in the statement. "We're chiefly concerned about relative, rather than absolute changes in brightness. We can just measure these changes from nearby unsaturated pixels, and ignore the saturated areas altogether."

After measuring the light around a star, White and his colleagues found they still needed to adjust their data for any changes in the spacecraft's motion and possible imperfections in the camera's detector. Even the slightest error could prevent the researchers from detecting a star's variability, the authors suggest, adding those errors could be corrected using simple algorithms.

To account for any discrepancies in their measurements, the authors developed "a new technique to weight the contribution of each pixel to find the right balance where instrumental effects are canceled out, revealing the true stellar variability," the Royal Astronomical Society's press release said. White and his colleagues named this new technique "halo photometry."

No exoplanets were detected, but the technique could help Kepler, TESS, and the JWST to spot exoplanets around bright stars, including Alpha Centauri.

Also at the Royal Astronomical Society and the Stellar Astrophysics Centre.

Beyond the Kepler/K2 bright limit: variability in the seven brightest members of the Pleiades (DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stx1050) (DX) (arXiv)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

In a televised event, Russia's President Vladimir Putin spoke to a group of students about a number of topics, including AI and drones:

Russian president Vladimir Putin spoke about the potential power of artificial intelligence to students on Friday, saying "the one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world," according to Associated Press. He then said "it would be strongly undesirable if someone wins a monopolist position," indicating that Russia would cooperate with other countries in the development of AI. While Russia is seen as skilled in technological propaganda, it has little presence in mainstream AI research.

Putin also envisioned a future for war where drones, ostensibly controlled by artificial intelligence, would fight proxy wars between countries. "When one party's drones are destroyed by drones of another, it will have no other choice but to surrender," he said.

Russian companies have been actively researching autonomous weapons, such as drones, robots and missiles, which would be able to pick targets and fire on their own. Documents from the US military show similar strategies, where swarms of drones would assist troops with real-time intelligence gathering and air support.

janrinok writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In a study published in Cancer Cell, researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, King's College London and Barts Cancer Institute discovered that acute myeloid leukemia (AML) - the most common acute leukemia affecting adults - causes bone marrow to 'leak' blood, preventing chemotherapy from being delivered properly. Drugs that reversed bone marrow leakiness boosted the effect of chemotherapy in mice and human tissue, providing a possible new combination therapy for AML patients.

"We found that the cancer was damaging the walls of blood vessels responsible for delivering oxygen, nutrients, and chemotherapy. When we used drugs to stop the leaks in mice, we were able to kill the cancer using conventional chemotherapy," says Diana Passaro, first author of the paper and researcher at the Francis Crick Institute.

As the drugs are already in clinical trials for other conditions, it is hoped that they could be given the green light for AML patients in the future.

[...] "Our findings suggest that it might be possible to predict how well people with AML will respond to chemotherapy," says Dominique Bonnet, senior author of the paper and Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute.

"We've uncovered a biological marker for this type of leukemia as well as a possible drug target. The next step will be clinical trials to see if NO blockers can help AML patients as much as our pre-clinical experiments suggest."

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

HPE says it has closed the $8.8bn deal to spin off much of its software business with Micro Focus.

The enterprise giant said that the deal – which sees HPE merge the unwanted portion of its software operation with the UK-based Micro Focus to create what analysts estimate to be the seventh-largest software vendor in the world – had been finalized.

"With the completion of this transaction, HPE has achieved a major milestone in becoming a stronger, more focused company, purpose-built to compete and win in today's market," said HPE CEO Meg Whitman.

"And, this transaction will deliver approximately $8.8bn to HPE and its stockholders."

First announced in September 2016, the reverse-takeover agreement sees HPE selling off its IT management, big data, and security lines to Micro Focus, which will try to make the products more successful than they were under the former HP Inc.

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/01/hpe_8bn_micro_focus_software_spinoff/

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

UCLA physicists have proposed new theories for how the universe's first black holes might have formed and the role they might play in the production of heavy elements such as gold, platinum and uranium.

Two papers on their work were published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

A long-standing question in astrophysics is whether the universe's very first black holes came into existence less than a second after the Big Bang or whether they formed only millions of years later during the deaths of the earliest stars.

Alexander Kusenko, a UCLA professor of physics, and Eric Cotner, a UCLA graduate student, developed a compellingly simple new theory suggesting that black holes could have formed very shortly after the Big Bang, long before stars began to shine. Astronomers have previously suggested that these so-called primordial black holes could account for all or some of the universe's mysterious dark matter and that they might have seeded the formation of supermassive black holes that exist at the centers of galaxies. The new theory proposes that primordial black holes might help create many of the heavier elements found in nature.

The researchers began by considering that a uniform field of energy pervaded the universe shortly after the Big Bang. Scientists expect that such fields existed in the distant past. After the universe rapidly expanded, this energy field would have separated into clumps. Gravity would cause these clumps to attract one another and merge together. The UCLA researchers proposed that some small fraction of these growing clumps became dense enough to become black holes.

Their hypothesis is fairly generic, Kusenko said, and it doesn't rely on what he called the "unlikely coincidences" that underpin other theories explaining primordial black holes.

The paper suggests that it's possible to search for these primordial black holes using astronomical observations. One method involves measuring the very tiny changes in a star's brightness that result from the gravitational effects of a primordial black hole passing between Earth and that star. Earlier this year, U.S. and Japanese astronomers published a paper on their discovery of one star in a nearby galaxy that brightened and dimmed precisely as if a primordial black hole was passing in front of it.

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-3p-Browser-Market-Share

According to Net Applications' Netmarketshare, the Linux market share on the desktop as judged by browser interactions may now be above 3%.

The company is reporting a 3.37% Linux marketshare for August 2017, a rise from 2.53% a month prior and the first time they have reported the Linux desktop marketshare above 3%.

They report Windows meanwhile at 90.7%, macOS at 5.94%, and the other operating systems statistically at zero. Their monthly report can be found here.

Original Submission